Meet Josh Tomlinson: bringing together both sides of the energy market

You’ve just joined Equity as Operations Director. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into energy?

I started out on the wholesale side. I spent the early part of my career on a graduate programme with BG Group, which took me around a few different markets – including a stint in Australia – before the business was acquired by Shell. I then spent close to a decade at Shell in gas, power and environmental products trading, working across Europe.

That gave me a technical grounding in how energy markets work. But wholesale trading isn’t a customer-facing world. So, when I moved to Amber as Head of Trading, and later Procurement and Risk Director, that was where I really started to understand what businesses need from their energy partner, and where the traditional model does and doesn’t help them.

You’ve moved from trading into a customer-facing role. What have you learned about what businesses want?

It’s that cost management sits at the centre of almost every conversation. We’ve come through the energy crisis, and while commodity prices have eased, overall costs remain inflationary. What that means in practice is that decarbonisation only really works for most businesses if it’s also delivering savings. The two can’t be separated.

The challenge is that a traditional brokerage has fairly limited levers to pull. You can help a client choose the right supplier and product, trade the market well, stay on top of consumption, pick up billing errors. All valuable, but the savings you can unlock that way only go so far. To make a more material difference, you have to look wider than the contract.

Is that what drew you to Equity Energies?

Very much so. What excited me was that the business is pursuing a genuinely different strategy; less a one-off, transactional service and more a long-term, partnership approach with clients. Rather than only procuring the best contract, you’re doing that alongside investing in on-site assets, optimising them, and looking at how a business participates in the wider market. Being able to bring those pieces together is where I think the real value for customers sits, and you can already see those elements joining up here.

You’ve talked about reaching net zero without sacrificing financial performance. Can you expand on that?

A handful of very large organisations can effectively buy their way to a sustainability position overnight by purchasing renewable generation assets outright and reporting against them, even where that doesn’t necessarily stack up financially in isolation. But that’s a tiny fraction of the market. For everyone else, the question is what return an investment delivers and how it aligns with a credible route to Net Zero.

That’s where a more holistic approach can help. When procurement, on-site generation and storage, and tariff optimisation are designed together rather than in isolation, you can pursue decarbonisation and cost control at the same time, finding the right balance for your business. My background across both wholesale markets and customer-side procurement hopefully helps me connect those dots.

What made this the right move for you personally?

Honestly, conviction as much as anything. Having spent years in wholesale energy, I’d become conscious that the pace of the transition often wasn’t matching the ambition being talked about around it. I care about Net Zero being something businesses can genuinely reach, but in a cost-effective, commercially sound way, not by throwing money at it. Equity Energies’ direction lined up with that, so it felt like the right place to try to build something more meaningful.

And what’s life outside of the industry like?

Away from work, life is quite full as we’ve got two young children. A few years ago, we moved out of London to Swansea, so we’re by the beach now, which has been a good change of pace. If I manage to get out for a run along the beach every now and then, I count that as a win.

Josh Tomlinson – Operations Director, Equity Energies